Abjection
Based on Wikipedia: Abjection
Picture yourself walking past a dead animal on the road. Something happens in that moment—a visceral recoil, a turning away, a feeling that lodges somewhere between your stomach and your throat. You're not just seeing something unpleasant. You're experiencing what philosophers call abjection, and understanding it might be the key to understanding everything from why horror movies work to why societies persecute outsiders.
The Horror We Can't Look Away From
In 1980, the Bulgarian-French philosopher Julia Kristeva published a book with a title that sounds like it belongs in a haunted library: Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. The book would go on to influence fields as diverse as film criticism, feminist theory, and organizational psychology. But at its core, Kristeva was trying to name something we all know but rarely examine.
The abject isn't simply disgusting. It's something more unsettling.
Kristeva argued that abjection occurs when we're confronted with our "corporeal reality"—a fancy way of saying that we're forced to acknowledge the messy, biological, mortal nature of our bodies. A corpse is the ultimate example. It was once a person, a subject with thoughts and desires and a name. Now it's becoming an object, thing-like, decaying. It occupies an impossible middle ground that our minds rebel against.
This is what makes the abject different from ordinary disgust. When you see garbage, you think "that's dirty" and move on. When you encounter the abject, something fundamental about your sense of self feels threatened. The boundary between you and not-you, between the living and the dead, between order and chaos—these boundaries start to wobble.
What Exactly Gets Cast Out
Kristeva was building on the work of two earlier psychoanalytic giants: Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Both had studied what happens when personal boundaries break down—Freud through his work on neurosis, Lacan through his analysis of psychosis. But Kristeva took their insights in a new direction.
She observed that the abject exists in a strange in-between space. It's not quite an object, something separate from us that we can study at a distance. It's not quite a subject, part of our identity. Instead, the abject consists of things that were once part of us—or part of what we considered ourselves—but have been violently rejected.
Think about what happens when we vomit. The food was inside us, part of our body's processes. Then suddenly it's expelled, cast out, and we find it revolting in a way that food on a plate never could be. The disgust isn't really about the substance itself. It's about the violation of the boundary between inside and outside.
Kristeva made this point explicitly: "It is thus not the lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, and order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite."
The First Thing We Reject
Here's where Kristeva's theory takes a controversial turn. She argued that the very first act of abjection in every person's life involves rejecting the mother.
Before birth and in the earliest months of life, we exist in a state of fusion with our mothers. There's no clear boundary between self and other. To become an individual, to develop an identity, we have to push away from this original unity. We have to make the maternal into something other, something separate.
This primal rejection, Kristeva suggested, echoes through all our later experiences of abjection. When we recoil from bodily fluids, decay, or the breakdown of boundaries, we're re-experiencing in small ways that original separation. The abject reminds us of a time before we had a stable self—and that reminder is terrifying.
Societies, she argued, develop elaborate rituals of defilement precisely to keep these boundaries clear. Purity rules, taboos, cleansing ceremonies—all of these help us maintain the fiction that nature and culture, body and mind, self and other are neatly separated. In the ritual act, we paradoxically both exclude the abject and renew contact with it under controlled conditions.
When the Familiar Becomes Foreign
Kristeva's concept of abjection shares territory with another famous psychological idea: the uncanny. Sigmund Freud wrote about the uncanny—in German, das Unheimliche, literally "the un-home-like"—as that peculiar feeling when something is both familiar and deeply strange at the same time.
A wax figure that looks too real. A house you've never visited that feels like you've been there before. Your own face in a photograph, suddenly looking like a stranger's.
The abject often works through uncanniness. A corpse is uncanny because it looks like a person we might have known, might have loved, but something essential is missing. This creates what psychologists call cognitive dissonance—our brains can't reconcile what we're seeing with what we expect. The corpse should be a person. It isn't. We revolt.
But the abject goes further than the uncanny. The uncanny unsettles. The abject threatens to dissolve us entirely.
Monsters and the Maternal
If you want to see abjection in action, look no further than the horror movie Alien, released in 1979—just a year before Kristeva published her book. Film critics have analyzed Ridley Scott's masterpiece as an extended meditation on everything Kristeva was describing.
The alien creature doesn't just kill. It reproduces by forcing itself into human bodies, gestating inside them, then bursting out in a grotesque parody of birth. The alien is constantly changing, shedding forms, resisting easy categorization. It drips, it oozes, it violates every boundary between inside and outside.
Scholars have noted that the alien can be read as a monstrous version of the maternal—the archaic, all-powerful mother from whom we must separate to become ourselves. The film's terror comes not just from the threat of death but from the threat of being absorbed, penetrated, made into something other than ourselves.
This analysis might seem academic, but it helps explain why Alien still terrifies viewers decades later while other monster movies of its era feel dated. The alien taps into something primal, something that predates our conscious memories.
Seeking Sainthood in the Gutter
Not everyone runs from the abject. Some actively seek it out.
The French writer Jean Genet published The Thief's Journal in 1949, three decades before Kristeva's theoretical framework existed. The book is a fictionalized account of Genet's wanderings through Depression-era Europe as a thief, prostitute, and general outcast. But Genet didn't describe his life of crime with shame or regret.
Instead, he claimed to be pursuing abjection deliberately, as a form of existentialist sainthood.
Where traditional saints purify themselves by rejecting worldly pleasures, Genet sought purification by diving into degradation. He embraced filth, crime, and social rejection as paths to a kind of twisted transcendence. If society defined certain experiences as abject, then living fully in that abjection became a way of escaping society's power over him.
This might sound like mere provocation, but Genet's work was taken seriously by philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote an eight-hundred-page analysis of Genet's life and writings. The idea that abjection could be transformed from something that victimizes us into something we choose would later resonate in punk rock, body art, and various countercultures that deliberately embraced what mainstream society found revolting.
Bodies That Don't Behave
Australian literature of the 1990s produced a genre that critics called "grunge lit"—gritty, realistic novels about young people whose bodies refused to cooperate with social expectations. The characters in these books have skin that breaks out in rashes, diseases that won't be cured, bodies that embarrass and betray them.
In Andrew McGahan's novel Praise, both main characters are sick. Cynthia's skin erupts unpredictably. Their bodies won't let them forget their corporeality, their animal nature, their distance from the clean, controlled bodies that advertising and social convention demand.
Critics noted that these novels did something interesting with abjection. Rather than simply depicting abject bodies as victims, the characters claimed their marginality as a source of power. They stayed in what one critic memorably called "shit creek" and made it their home. Their diseases and dysfunctions became, paradoxically, "sites of symbolic empowerment and agency."
This represents a recurring theme in how people respond to being labeled abject: transformation. If you can't escape being seen as disgusting, contaminating, boundary-violating, you might be able to redefine what those labels mean.
The Marginalized as Living Abject
Kristeva developed her theory primarily by analyzing literature and individual psychology. But the concept of abjection has proven equally useful for understanding how societies treat certain groups of people.
Women, unwed mothers, religious minorities, sex workers, prisoners, poor people, disabled people—at various times and places, all of these groups have been treated as abject. They've been cast out, viewed as contaminating, subjected to elaborate rituals of separation and exclusion.
The historian Ian McCormick traced how eighteenth and nineteenth-century discussions of prostitution, homosexuality, and masturbation consistently linked these behaviors to imagery of pollution, filth, and impurity. The people who engaged in them weren't just breaking rules. They were imagined as physically contaminating, their bodies producing dangerous substances that threatened social order.
This matters because abjection is more powerful than simple disapproval. If a society merely disapproves of a group, that group can argue for acceptance. But if a society experiences a group as abject—as threatening the very boundaries that make identity possible—the emotional response is far more intense and far harder to reason with.
Abjection in the Workplace
Organizations, it turns out, practice abjection too.
Researchers studying organizational behavior have documented how institutions silence, exclude, and disavow certain feelings, practices, and groups of people. They create what Kristeva might call "zones of inhabitability"—spaces where people who don't fit the organizational norm are pushed.
One mechanism is what scholars call "collective instruction." When something potentially abject threatens an organization—a scandal, a failure, an embarrassing truth—the organization responds by controlling the narrative. Press releases, official statements, carefully crafted talking points all work to create a unified, acceptable meaning.
Through this process, the abject event is gradually transformed. What might have been interpreted as evidence of institutional failure becomes evidence of the institution's resilience and good management. The threatening truth is ejected from collective memory, replaced by a sanitized version that doesn't disturb the organization's sense of itself.
Where Death Becomes Daily
Some workplaces can't avoid the abject. Hospitals, for instance, are places where bodily breakdown, suffering, and death occur constantly. How do the people who work there manage?
Nurses occupy a particularly interesting position. They're in close physical proximity to the ill, the wounded, and the dying. They deal with bodily fluids, wounds, and corpses in ways that hospital administrators never have to. They're confronted with abjection in its most concrete, unavoidable form.
To function, nurses must learn to separate themselves emotionally from the suffering around them. This isn't callousness—it's survival. The hospital helps by providing very strict rituals and power structures. These rituals might seem bureaucratic or unnecessarily rigid to outsiders, but they serve a purpose: they create symbolic boundaries that protect workers from being overwhelmed by the abject realities they face daily.
Studies suggest that understanding abjection helps explain not just individual anxiety in healthcare settings but also how that anxiety shapes hospital policy at an institutional level.
The Sociology of Disgust
The sociologist Imogen Tyler wanted to make Kristeva's concept more explicitly social. Rather than focusing on individual psychology, she examined abjection as "a social and lived process"—something that happens between people and groups, not just inside individual minds.
Tyler studied contemporary Britain and found that certain groups had been labeled as what she called "revolting figures." These weren't just people that mainstream society disapproved of. They were people who provoked visceral disgust, who were imagined as contaminating or threatening social boundaries.
But Tyler also documented something Kristeva had paid less attention to: how the abjected fight back. Those who find themselves labeled as disgusting don't simply accept that judgment. They revolt against their abject identity, pushing back against marginalization, stigma, and social exclusion. The abject, it turns out, have agency.
This matters because it suggests that abjection isn't a one-way process. Power relationships are involved. Those who do the abjecting want to maintain their position; those who are abjected have their own strategies of resistance.
The Gaze That Wounds
Researchers have studied how people look at those whose bodies differ from the norm due to illness, injury, or congenital conditions. What they've found illuminates abjection in action.
A person with a visible disability is, in Kristeva's terms, "the one by whom the abject exists." They are both similar to the typical observer and different—a living reminder of the body's vulnerability, its potential for breakdown, its distance from idealized images of physical perfection.
When people encounter such a person, they typically respond in one of two ways. Some attempt to ignore the difference entirely, refusing to make eye contact, pretending the person isn't there. Others stare intrusively, unable to look away from what disturbs them.
Both responses are problematic for the person being looked at. The first treats them as an object that can be ignored, denying their personhood. The second defines them entirely by their difference, turning them into a spectacle. Neither allows for ordinary human connection.
When Your Own Body Becomes Abject
Sometimes we abject parts of ourselves.
Body dysmorphic disorder, often abbreviated as BDD, is a condition in which a person becomes obsessed with a perceived flaw in their appearance—a flaw that others typically can't see or consider trivial. Research suggests that abjection plays a central role in this disorder.
People with BDD are intensely sensitive to being looked at. They imagine that others notice and judge the supposed flaw constantly. Shame amplifies their distress, creating a vicious cycle: the more ashamed they feel, the more certain they become that the flaw is visible and disgusting.
Over time, the person may come to experience the troublesome body part as somehow separate from themselves. It becomes a "rogue body part"—abjected, cast out from the self even while remaining physically attached. The person's own body has become, in a sense, foreign to them.
Social anxiety can produce something similar, though affecting the entire social self rather than a specific body part. People with severe social anxiety perceive themselves as awkward, strange, failing to perform normal social rituals correctly. Their whole social persona becomes abject—something shameful that must be hidden or minimized.
Understanding these conditions through the lens of abjection helps therapists see connections between individual suffering and broader cultural forces. The shame that drives BDD doesn't come from nowhere; it reflects cultural ideals about how bodies should look and behave.
Art That Makes You Sick
If the abject provokes such powerful responses, it's not surprising that artists have wanted to harness it.
The Tate defines abject art as work that "explore themes that transgress and threaten our sense of cleanliness and propriety, particularly referencing the body and bodily functions." The tradition has deep roots—painters have depicted blood and violence for centuries—but abject art as a movement emerged from the Dada experiments of the early twentieth century and Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty.
In the 1960s, the Viennese Actionists pushed these ideas to extremes. Hermann Nitsch founded a group called the Orgien-Mysterien-Theater—the Orgies Mysteries Theater—which used animal carcasses and blood in ritualistic performances. Nitsch served time in prison for blasphemy before being invited to New York in 1968, where his performances influenced the city's radical art scene.
Other Viennese Actionists went even further. Günter Brus, who began as a painter, created performances in which he urinated, defecated, and cut himself with razor blades in front of audiences. Rudolf Schwarzkogler became known for photographs dealing explicitly with abject subject matter.
By the late 1960s, performance art exploring similar territory had become established in New York, practiced by artists like Carolee Schneemann. In the 1980s and 1990s, after Kristeva's Powers of Horror had provided theoretical vocabulary for what these artists were doing, a second wave of radical performers emerged: Ron Athey, Franko B, Lennie Lee, Kira O'Reilly. These artists worked with their own bodies and bodily fluids, forcing audiences to confront exactly what Kristeva had theorized.
Why Any of This Matters
The Whitney Museum in New York formally identified abject art as a category in 1993, but by then the concept of abjection had spread far beyond the art world. Scholars were using it to analyze horror films and hate crimes, organizational dysfunction and individual anxiety disorders.
Why has this particular theoretical framework proven so durable and so widely applicable?
Perhaps because abjection names something real that we experience constantly but rarely examine. We all have things we find disgusting in ways that go beyond simple preference. We all maintain boundaries between self and other, clean and contaminated, acceptable and revolting. Understanding where these boundaries come from and how they're maintained helps us understand ourselves—and the societies we build.
It also helps us notice when those boundaries are being weaponized against particular groups of people. When a society describes immigrants as "infesting" a country, when political rhetoric frames opponents as "sick" or "polluting," when certain bodies are treated as inherently disgusting or dangerous—these are operations of abjection. Recognizing them for what they are is the first step toward resisting them.
The abject will always be with us. Our bodies will always produce fluids, break down, eventually die. But we have choices about what we make abject beyond these biological facts, and those choices reveal as much about us as anything else we do.